eBay’s CEO Gets Glowing Profile On AI & Focus Verticals - But Does Reality Live Up To The Hype?
eBay CEO Jamie Iannone hypes AI agenda and the company's recent stock turnaround in glowing Semafor CEO Signal feature.
The interview, originally featured in Semafor's invite only newsletter for big business CEOs about big business CEOs, credits Iannone's strategy shift to "focus verticals" and "enthusiast buyers" and adoption of AI to "reduce friction" for eBay's outperformance in the stock market - but do those claims reflect the current reality of buying and selling on the marketplace?
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Semafor says, "At its core is a focus on eBay’s most passionate users, and the application of AI to the vast data set that comes from having 134 million active buyers, 2.4 billion listings, and 30 years of proprietary pricing and sales records."
What they don't say is that under Iannone's leadership, eBay has actually significantly lost buyers, with Q2 2025 marking the 13th consecutive quarter where they had less Active Buyers than in Q1 2018 - a fact that can't be erased by eking out minor ~1% year over year growth in recent quarters.
Note: eBay changed the definition of GMV and Active Buyers at the end of 2021 and restated both figures going back to 2018 (chart reflects restated figures per eBay's amended reports.)
eBay currently defines Active Buyers as "all buyers who paid for a transaction on our Marketplace platforms within the previous 12-month period. Buyers may register more than once, and as a result, may have more than one account."
Semafor also says, "Much of eBay’s marketing has targeted the 16 million enthusiasts who, it says, account for 70% of the value of goods sold on its site."
But again, they failed to mention that "enthusiast buyers" (those who shop on eBay at least 6 times per year, spend at least $800 per year or those who also sell on the site) dropped from ~17 Million to ~16 Million in Q4 2022 - which is where it has been stuck since, including eBay's most recent Q2 2025 earnings report.
eBay leadership has been pulling out all the stops trying to reinvigorate Enthusiast Buyer growth over the last year with steep discount offers and new features specifically designed to incentivize activity that would fit the enthusiast criteria - but so far, none of those efforts have managed to move the needle.
Liz Morton
Later in the interview, Iannone also mentions that he encourages all eBay employees to buy and sell on the site - and while that may represent a small percentage, it's still worth noting that employee activity is also counted in total Active and Enthusiast Buyer statistics presented on quarterly earnings reports.
At least Iannone was smart enough not to repeat the laughable assertion that no counterfeit items have ever passed through eBay's authentication centers in this interview.
Liz Morton
Unsurprisingly, much of the interview focused on eBay's AI initiatives with Iannone touting how the technology has "removed friction" from buying and selling on the site.
“Our competitor was friction in the process,” he says, but AI has been “a real game-changer” in helping eBay reduce that friction. A user wondering whether to sell a trading card, for example, can now snap a picture with their phone, and eBay’s AI tools will identify the collectible, draft a description of it, suggest an attractive background for the image, and offer advice on how to price it.
That all sounds great, if it works - which many actual users say it often doesn't.
Liz Morton
Far too often eBay's AI tools simply fail to live up to the hype, often still requiring far too much manual entry or serving up wildly inaccurate or irrelevant results.
Liz Morton
Beyond that, eBay is using AI in other troubling ways, altering seller images without disclosure or summarizing seller provided descriptions and item specifics with questionable results that may drive negative buyers experiences and unfair item not as described claims.
Liz Morton
Iannone claims in the interview to have personally saved eBay a million dollars by using AI to create a 3 minute video for an internal presentation about his vision for the company.
Iannone’s AI agenda extends to commissioning AI-written “walk-on music” for his appearance at the eBay Open event, themed to its latest marketing campaign. For the company’s AI week and another recent gathering of senior managers, he went one step further, using an AI video generator to create a three-minute film of his vision for the company’s future.
“I built that with one other person over a couple of days,” he says. To have done something similar in the past, “I would have gone to an agency, written a creative brief, probably spent hundreds of thousands, if not a million dollars, to shoot all that creative, etc. And me and one other person were able to put that together, and people were blown away by it.”
I sincerely doubt Iannone was previously spending a million dollars to have agencies create internal presentation content like this - and if he was, then ex-Chief Financial Officer Steve Priest has a lot to answer for if he allowed that kind of expense to be a regular occurance at the company.
But the anecdote may still be an interesting look into how Iannone is personally using AI, especially when viewed alongside a recently posted job ad showing eBay is looking for an AI Design Technologist, CEO Office.
The role will report to the Chief of Staff to the CEO, serving as a "strategic technical partner and prototyping force multiplier" while "helping shape and define what the future of eBay should look and feel like in an AI-powered world."
The focus on having such a crucial AI strategy position nestled in the office of the CEO is interesting, and potentially raises questions about why this role isn't instead reporting to Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov and whether that might create internal tension, conflict and/or confusion.
Beyond the AI hype, Iannone told Semafor that he sees eBay’s customers as its other greatest source of inspiration. “They’re on the site 24/7, and they have the best ideas about what could help them.”
The article goes on to say that Iannone "puts a premium on engaging the site’s most ardent users" with the recent eBay Open event, which included in person opportunities for users to provide feedback to eBay staff, as an example of how much eBay values seller engagement.
Iannone says his own conversations with eBay users have prompted changes, such as raising the limit on the number of photographs featured in each handbag listing, and alerts that advise sellers when a buyer is loyal enough to merit a special offer or a personalized note.
“When the CEO is talking to sellers and buyers all the time, and then the whole organization starts doing that, you can massively improve the pace of innovation,” he says. For the same reason, he encourages staff to buy and sell on the site regularly. His own recent purchases include a pair of refurbished headphones for his daughter. (“She gets a two-year warranty. A new product comes with, like, 90 days or a year,” he raves.)
Again, I highly doubt that Iannone's daughter jump through the many hoops and obstacles other buyers have reported with the Allstate warranty eBay provides for refurbished items if those headphones break, but a publication built entirely on the premise of having access to "the world's top executives" is likely not going to be inclined to pushback on obviously silly anecdotes like this.
In that light, this piece reads as just another carefully curated interview that is part of an explicit communications strategy of "leveraging media relationships to elevate eBay’s brand and reputation...fostering relationships with key media... [and] placing executive profiles, bylines & speaking ops that further the company narrative."
Liz Morton
Beyond that - if you were to spend 5 minutes scrolling through eBay's own community forums or talking to a random selection of actual buyers and sellers (not carefully curated by eBay), it would be immediately clear that neither more pictures for handbag listings nor repeat buyer notifications were high priority actions items and there are far more important issues users would prefer for Iannone to focus on.
For a seller's eye view of eBay Open and the company's floundering seller engagement efforts, check out this recent video from Flippin' Ain't Easy.
What do you think of eBay CEO Jamie Iannone's interviews with Semafor's CEO Signal? Let us know in the comments below!
